“The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that makes us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habiatation- a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.”

-from a letter of Franz Kafka to Oskar Pollak

Mapplethorpe died from HIV in 1989 and I feel our generation has missed out. Erotic without cliches, or sometimes cleverly cliche to the point or satire, his work is provocative, and carries a sense of beauty no matter how grotestque the subject.

“My kids are starting to notice I’m a little different from the other dads. “Why don’t you have a straight job like everyone else?” they asked me the other day. I told them this story: in the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, “Look at me…I’m tall, and I’m straight, and I’m handsome. Look at you…you’re all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you.” And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, “Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest.” So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.”

BEAR NAKED

I am making a book about love. Actually I am starting a whole series of hand bound books about its facets. Here are some rough pics of what I have in store so far. June 21st it launches in Toronto

cheers

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Soooo,

Forest Fires “News” I can’t turn off

a perfect day to just oogle my favourite living figurative painters:

Alex Kanevsky

Robbin Williams

John Currin

Ray Ceasar

Jenny Saville

Lu Cong

Lucien Freud

Jorge Galindo

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ANNIE

One should say before sleeping, “I have lived many lives. I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved has sat upon my knees and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved. Everything that has been shall be again”

–from an essay by W.B. Yeats

I am alive when your tiny hairs are.

If we stood too close we might bind like books.

Nerves reborn in sheetsFingers become playthingsTidersticks egging each other to touch harderharder.

Giving into nightall of you unravelsall of you appearsall at once– tongues and whispers run freefinallyand I am goneso far goneso heavy in love with youprickly grin n’ nothing

Towering above my frameNow you are a map to the Taj Mahala pathway of underskin streamshot vein veering into hot vein veeringdown down downas you bloom like Odysseushomebound, adorned and adored

You are your own ariayour own Rembrandtraising a monument just for us,just now call the press unlock the gates let every feather fly no inch left un wooed no crevice left dryand there is no tomorrowas you lick my sticky upper lip (the lip that loves you too much)because tonightletting the moon seep inyou are my summer sweatermy man my mango

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CLAYTOR FACE

Jon Claytor is the best at knowing when to put down his brush, be it half painted images, with raw canvas or previous brushwork peeking through, or shlopping on impulsive sayings and trusting that people wont find it trite. I have loved this painter since 2004 and he was the reason I switched to people. They are juicy; they scream ambivalence in the most emotional of settings. This has become a main goal for me- to project a surface nonchalance, but to suggest the fear and naiveté and omnipotence that encompasses adolescence. These are a few of my favourites of his: